USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights.
All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Eleanor
Antin Before the Revolution, Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles, January 29, 2012 / I saw the matinee performance of this
work

Of all of artist Eleanor Antin's
numerous personae, Eleanora Antinova, the Black American dancer attempting to
be a leading ballerina in Diaghilev's famed Ballets Russes, is the most
endearing. Somehow the very idea of the somewhat short, dark complexioned
Antin—a woman who makes no claim to being able to dance in "real"
life, and certainly has not trained for ballet—joining the tall "all-white
machine" of Diaghilev's company goes beyond absurdity into the world of a
touching fantasy, when Antin as Antinova plays out again and again her several Eleanora Antinova Plays, performances
enacted by the artist from the mid-1970s through the next decade, works that my
own Sun & Moon Press collected into a book of 1994.

Of these works, perhaps the most significant was the 1979 Before the Revolution, in which,
performing numerous characters—from Antinova, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Nijinsky,
to balletic beings such has Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI—Antin develops her
"Historical Prophecy and an Interlude and an Interruption." Although
I have seen most of Antin's performances when they first appeared, I did not
witness the 1979 premier of Before the
Revolution at The Kitchen in New York and its later manifestation at the
Santa Barbara Museum of Art. So I was delighted to be able to attend what she
has described as a"re-performance" of the piece, this with several actors, on
January 29, 2012.

The work is divided into six sections: I. The Lesson, II. The Argument,
III. The Vision, IV. The Rehearsal, V. The Interruption, and VI. The Truth,
each loosely connected with the actions conveyed in their titles. The overall
arc of this disjunctive narrative is Antinova's insistence that she dance a major
role in the Ballet Russes instead of playing merely ancillary and exotic figures
such as Pocahontas, etc., her arguments with Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and others
about permitting her these roles, her insistence on choreographing her own
ballet—wherein she plays a ridiculously overstated Marie Antoinette—her
rehearsals for that performance, and her personal relationships with other
figures of the company, particularly the disturbed Nijinsky.

At the heart of this work, however, is Antin's personal
"Interruption," wherein Antin states the major themes of her piece,
and argues for an art that not only "borrows" or builds upon the
past, but, in a Brechtian manner, creates a space between the artist and the
figure she portrays, that must be joined through the imaginations of the
audience. Beginning with a discussion of Diaghilev, accused by several as being
a borrower, Antin brings several of these issues together in a monologue that
might almost be stated as a kind of manifesto of her art:

And who is not a borrower? Didn't we get
our face and our name from our parents, the words in our mouths from our
country, the way we say them from the children on our block, our dreams and
images from the books and pictures other people wrote, painted, filmed? We take
from here, from there and give back—whatever we give back. And we cover what we
give back with our name: John Smith, Eleanora Antinova, Tamara Karasavina,
Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev, and somewhere each one of us stands behind that
name, sort of.

Sometimes there is a space between a person and her name. I can't always
reach my name. Between me and Eleanor Antin sometimes there is a space. No,
that's not true. Between me and Eleanor Antin there is always a space. I act as
if there isn't. I make believe it isn't there. Recently, the Bank of America
refused to cash one of my checks. My signature was unreadable, the bank manager
said. "It is the signature of an important person," I shouted.
"You do not read the signature of an important person, you recognize
it." That's as close as I can get to my name. And I was right, too.
Because the bank continues to cash my checks. That idiosyncratic and illegible
scrawl has credit there. This space between me and my name has to be filled
with credit.

What of me and Antinova? I borrow her dark skin, her reputation, her
name, which is very much like mine anyway. She borrowed the name from the
Russians, from Diaghilev. I borrow her aspirations to be a classical ballerina.
She wants to dance the white ballets. What an impossible eccentric! A Black
ballerina dancing Les Sylphides, Giselle, Swan Lake. She would be a "black
face in a snow bank!" The classical ballet is a white machine. Nobody must
be noticed out of turn. The slightest eccentricity stands out and Grigoriev
hands out stiff fines to the luckless leg higher than the rest. So Antinova
designs her own classical ballet. She will dance the white queen
Marie-Antoinette. She invests the space between herself and the white queen
with faith...."

This profound statement of the separation
of art and artist who must be given credit by both the artist herself and the
viewer to make meaning, is at the heart of Antin's oeuvre, which, like a Kiekegaardian leap into faith, transforms
simple desire into an almost sacramental act.

The "Interruption" was even more poignant at the Hammer Museum
performance I witnessed because Antin read these words on a small I-pad whose
images disappeared as she spoke them, forcing her to ask her son Blaise to help
her recover the message she was attempting to repeat.

It was also interesting to have Eleanor Antinova played throughout by a
Black actress (Daniele Watts), who certainly frees Antin from being seen as a
white actress in Black face which some critics accused her of being the first
time round.

Actor Jonathan Le Billion was also very effective as the slightly mad
Nijinsky railing againstDiaghilev,
as the great dancer did in real life. But overall, the acting was mixed, with
some figures unable to completely realize their roles. In part, that is simply
due to the fact that in life these personalities were exaggerated and that
Antin's work is not, at heart, a drama. To say what Before the Revolution is, exactly, is difficult. Perhaps it is
easier to say what it isn't: it is not truly a play, an historical performance,
a monological statement, a ballet-in-the-making, a personal encounter with a
Black ballerina. It is all of these, but in its radical genre-bending elements,
it is so much more!

Although, as I mentioned previously, I did not see the original, it
seems to me it is essentially a work for one person. Eleanor may not have been
a greatest of actresses in that original, but given the "credit" we
must grant to bring her art into life, the slightly mad ramblings of a
single person, sometimes hiding behind cut-outs of her characters, seems the
most appropriate rendering of this fascinating performance. Despite the
separation of name and character, Antin becomes
Antinova, becomes even the figures
inhabiting Antinova's imagination in the original, and that, it seems to me, is
the true miracle of this art. What we witness is a kind of madness, a madness,
like Nijinsky's, that becomes transformed into something of significance. The
artist in this work is almost like a child, a child so intent upon imagining
other existences, that she truly creates them, bringing viable others into that
envelope between the creator and the creation. If that act demands credit, it
reflects back upon the audience for their commitment to the creative act,
coming as a kind of unexpected reward for their faith. Art, for Antin, is
almost always—despite its seeming focus on the various aspects of self—a communal
act. Her King of Solana Beach could never have been a king without willing
(even if unknowing) subjects. Antin's Nurse Eleanor Nightingale could not have
survived the Crimean War without her imaginary patients, just as Eleanora
Antinova is nothing without her willing claque. So too did the audience of Before the Revolution enthusiastically
applaud this dramatic presentation of the dilemmas of Antinova's life.

I was at Eleanor Antin's side after the 1981 performance, Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev
at the Museum of Modern Art, when an enthusiastic attendee, with great
reverence and respect, gushed, "Tell me, being so close to Diaghilev, what
was it really like?" Eleanor was a bit abashed; she would have had to be
in her mid-70s (she was currently in her 40s) to have actually performed with
Diaghilev's company. Yet I perceived that never before had "credit"
been so innocently and completely proffered!

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Lorraine
Hansbery A Raisin in the Sun / the
performance I saw was February 18, 2012 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Culver
City, California

by Douglas Messerli

I had not previously seen a stage
performance of the original Lorraine Hansbery play, A Raisin in the Sun, although I had long ago seen the film version
with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, and I had read the play some time in college,
as well as seeing the sentimentalized musical version in its premiere on May
30th, 1973, my 26th birthday at Washington, D.C.'s Arena Theater. So I thought
it only fitting that I check out a new stage production at the Kirk Douglas
Theater in Culver City, just a short drive from my Los Angeles home.

Although
the well-made play of political and social concerns is not generally my kind of
theater, I thought it might be interesting to see how the play has stood, to
use a tired cliché, "the test of time." And the fact that my previous
physician, with the strangely appropriate name of Dr. Redcross, was married to
a niece of Hansbery's, who was very involved in her aunt's estate and
interested in theater, made the visit an even more appropriate event.

When I mentioned my attendance of this play to an intelligent and highly
esteemed friend, her response was: "I couldn't possibly ever see anything
so sweet. If that makes an elitist, so be it."

Although at times A Raisin in the
Sun may be bittersweet, I would never characterize anything in this gritty
story of the Younger family as "sweet." Even the mother, Lena (Kim
Staunton), played to type as the sort of reaffirming, religious center of
family life, is rarely joyful. And the rest of the family, Walter Lee (Kevin T.
Carroll) and Beneatha (Kenya Alexander), particularly, battle it out in a
Chicago ghetto world that has little room for anyone but survivors. The
youngest of the Younger family, Travis, is forced to sleep on the couch, and is
sent out of the house to play whenever there is a serious family discussion or
argument—which occurs at regular intervals throughout the play.

Walter Lee's wife, Ruth (Deidrie Henry), is again pregnant, and given
the condition of their apartment and the family squabbles, is considering
having an abortion. Her husband, an incompetent dreamer, is so belittled by his
chauffeur job that he is near the level of despair suggested by the title's
quote from the Langston Hughes poem, "A Dream Deferred."

The family's major battle is over money, the insurance left by the death
of the father. For Lena the decision over the money is an obvious one: a part
of it will go for Beneatha's education as a doctor, the other for a new home in
Clybourne park. But her son's loss of manhood and despair forces her to hand
over some of the money so that he may play the role of the family head. Without
even depositing the amount, he invests it in a shoddy deal with a friend to
open a bar, only to find that the crook has absconded with the whole sum.

What struck me as particularly interesting
in this play is the fact that the issues it raises are still current. The most
interesting character of the drama is Beneatha, a strong young woman determined
to make a success through education, an opinionated being who is also
fascinated by her lost African roots. When her education money goes missing,
she is still determined to travel with her friend, Joseph Asagi (Amad Jackson)
to his homeland in Nigeria, in orderto
experience new worlds and sights.

The final straw that breaks this family is the racist reaction of the
"welcoming" committee to their new home, represented by the white Mr.
Karl Linder (Scott Mosenson), who tries to skirt the issue of racism by
describing a sense of community difference from their own: this community is
even willing to buy the house at a higher price than they have paid! At first,
all family members join in their disdain of the proposal, quickly showing him
the door. But the saddest moment of the play comes when, having lost the
remaining money, Walter Lee, completely giving up their dreams, decides to
capitulate, agreeing the Clybourne community's offer.

No sweetness in these choices, I can
assure you. That these troubling issues were spoken in a play of 1959 by a
Black woman, moreover, is startling. Hansbery may not be an adventuresome
writer, but she is certainly a forceful voice and a strong social conscience.

The only problem with the version, directed by Phylicia Rashad that I
attended was some of the character's attempts to play to the obviously
sympathetic audience. The character of Walter Lee, in particular, was often
played for humor. There is indeed irony, if not outright humor, in many of
Hansbery's lines, but to milk that in a role centered upon despair defeats the
playwright's purpose. Since Beneatha, in her more sophisticated thinking, is
almost an outsider to her own family, she was saved from these winking asides,
and was the stronger figure for it.

Yet overall and over all these years, Hansbery's A Raisin in the Sun remains a strong American statement of faith
and strength against the daily travails of inner city life. If that means these
characters or this play are somehow "sweet," then call me a
populist—something no one has ever described me as being before.